Solar panels are increasingly being used to provide renewable energy in a number of applications. For example, homeowners can now have solar panels installed including on their rooftops, business owners can install them on commercial buildings, and large-scale users and utility companies can have dedicated solar arrays in fields for generating large amounts of power. Smaller-scale applications have also become popular. One common small-scale application is to power streetlights. In existing solar streetlight applications, one or two solar panel modules are typically mounted in a south facing orientation and are attached to an existing streetlight pole. Some of these solar streetlight designs include batteries for storing generated solar power, which allow for off-grid lighting applications that are useful when it is cost-prohibitive to extend utility power from a grid to the streetlight location. For example, many solar streetlights are on remote highways, which are difficult to connect to a grid. On these kinds of streetlights, solar power modules (also known and referred to herein as solar panels, photovoltaic panels or modules, or PV panels or modules) are typically mounted using a triangle cantilevered out from the main pole. Many solar-powered street and parking lot lights combine the benefits of LED lighting (e.g., low energy usage, long lifespan) with the renewable solar power to light the LEDs, which conserves the amount of energy needed to provide light.
For any solar power application, the total installed cost and value proposition to the end customer (i.e., the consumer of the energy produced) are major considerations for the widespread adoption of solar technology for that particular application. Current designs of solar powered streetlights are focused on maximizing power output per module simply for the purposes of powering the light, and do not consider maximizing the power generation possible from the location of each pole. Therefore, only small solar panels, in small numbers, have heretofore been attached to existing poles, and the applications of solar power generated from solar panels attached to poles has been limited. This is because the weight and space of many existing solar panels makes it difficult to physically attach solar panels to poles. Several other challenges to doing so exist as well. For example attaching one or more solar panels to a pole would have to account for wind, weather, and the challenge of connecting produced power to individual users or a grid.
Given the ubiquity of existing poles that sit in direct sunlight all day, however, an opportunity exists for apparatuses and systems for mounting solar panels to such poles and connecting the power produced therefrom to end users.